To head for the mountains

It seems to be a very common fantasy among Indians working in the US – to chuck their corporate jobs and head off to the Himalayas. I have heard it from so many that it is practically a cliché.

And so when we planned our first trip within India, we chose the Himalayas. My wife wanted to spend much longer there, but I was the one who limited it to two weeks. I wanted to start small.

The part of the Himalayas we visited (Haridwar, Rishikesh, Mussoorie, Yamunotri, Gangotri) is mostly in the Garhwal region in Uttarakhand. Not snow-clad peaks this time of the year, but very scenic. The Ganges (Bhagirathi) gushes right along the roads wherever we went. The food was hearty, accommodations decent. Some of the bus and jeep journeys were scary due to the narrow roads and the sheer drop.

We took two weeks to make the trip that others routinely finish in 5 days. We overnighted in villages that weren’t even marked in the tourist maps. I consciously stayed away from the Internet for the entire 2 weeks.

The Himalayas, to many who dream of heading there, is an idealized version of a place where you can shed all your worldly worries and get away from it all. Garhwal came close.

Feels like Retirement

It’s been four months since I last went to work (my longest ever break in over 3 decades). And for the first time in all those months, this week, it felt like retirement. We all have images of what our retirement might feel like, of why it might be fun. This week my experience matched my mental image.

So I started thinking about why this might be, and how I could get this feeling to last longer.

• We are staying in a great place in Kauai for a very reasonable price. A place with a wrap-around balcony and great amenities.
• I have access to tons of DVD’s, great books, cable TV and the internet.
• Yes, those are the necessities. The important thing is that I am able to sit here (away from home and the accompanying “errand pressures”) in wonderful surroundings and savor these.
• We are here in Hawaii from Monday to Friday. While my ex-colleagues and friends and relatives are off to work, I am reading books and watching the campaigning for the upcoming election.
  
• For these last few months, when we go to places we haven’t been to, or may not visit again, we are under constant pressure to run around sightseeing. We have been to Kauai before. So sightseeing is not the goal, experiencing the Aloha spirit is.
• And finally, yesterday the Dow shot up 800 points, its second highest single-day gain ever. No matter how many times I tell myself that I should be immune to daily stock fluctuations, I admit that yesterday’s run up added to my general feeling of good cheer.

The 5-Year Change Rule

I used to be an evangelist for a rule. The rule was very simple: Every five years you should change your line of work completely and radically.

Do something different, re-invent your job. In my own case, I was following it. My Bachelor’s degree was in Chemical Engineering (4 years) and I switched my major for grad school. For the next 5 years I was smitten by the possibilities that Operations Research offered. And after that, I was doing programming and working on applied algorithms for an airline for around another 5 years.

It was in my early years at the airline that I would pitch the 5-year rule to whoever would listen. I felt that varied experience counted for more than deep expertise. I'd be telling them, "Variety is more important than success. Variety is success."

I was also influenced by books like Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, whose core message is to look at everything with fresh eyes.

Five years (give or take) seemed the right amount to be doing something before moving on. The first year was for learning, the next two were productive years to practice, and in the last two, we contribute in various ways and be a guide to newcomers. After that we hand over that job or role to others and move on.

This ‘rule’ allows us have 6 to 7 different facets in a 30-year career.

You don’t, of course, have to change companies. You can take up a very different role, something completely different in your own company. (This might even be better since the people at your company already know you and might be more tolerant while you are in the learning phase.)

On the flip side, one could change any number of jobs, work in a number of different industries, and still be doing essentially the same job. If that’s the case, it is time to invoke the 5-year change rule and try to make a bigger change.

I believed in this completely and was quite persuasive. I had quite a few converts back then. A lot of my colleagues and friends and classmates agreed with the 5-year-per-line theory and thought of applying it to their own careers.

However, once I got comfortable in my role, it turned out that I wasn’t practicing what I was preaching. The money was decent and the status quo was so very comfortable. I even got promotions which meant I had to do the decent thing and stick around a little longer. After some time I stopped mentioning the rule altogether. It felt phony to bring it up and eventually I even forgot about it.

I remembered this old rule a few days, probably because I've made a big change recently. (I am no longer working.) But I think the rule has a slightly different application in the context of retirement. I am now beginning to believe that anyone who adopts the 5-year change rule won’t feel such a strong urge to “retire.” It seems like a strategy to stave off routine and boredom before it even sets in.

Crowdsourcing and Retirement

At present, there’s a reasonably clear separation between working and retirement. They are two distinct states, and generally speaking, one moves on from the working state to the retirement state.

Crowdsourcing will, I am convinced, change that. It will further blur the line. One effect of crowdsourcing in the future will be to serve as the perestroika, the restructuring, which will bring down the Berlin wall between working and retirement.

If there are as many crowdsourced projects and companies in the future as I imagine there will be, then one can ease into whatever degree of semi-retirement one is comfortable with. That’s been my thinking after I finished reading Jeff Howe’s book, Crowdsourcing. (highly recommended.)

Listed below are some bits from the book I jotted down as reminders for myself.

• The best person to do a job is the one who most wants to do the job; and the best people to evaluate their performance are their friends and peers who, by the way, will enthusiastically pitch in to improve the final product, simply for the sheer pleasure of helping one another and creating something beautiful from which they all will benefit.
• “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. […] Given the right set of conditions, the crowd will almost always outperform any number of employees – a fact that companies are becoming aware of and are increasingly attempting to exploit.
• This diversely talented, highly skilled workforce must toil away in a labor market that requires ever-greater degree of specialization. This leaves people feeling overeducated and underfulfilled, with job satisfaction rates reaching all-time lows. Is it any wonder they’re seeking more meaningful work outside the confines of the workplace?
• [On Opensource code] “The GNU GPL ‘converted’ software it was used with to its own license, an extraordinarily clever approach to propagating freedom,” notes Glyn Moody in his history of open source movement, Rebel Code. This little trick has come to be known as “copyleft” as opposed to copyright.
• What makes open source so efficient? In the broadest of strokes, it’s the ability for a large number of people to contribute. The open source evangelist Eric S. Raymond famously summed up this fundamental truth when he wrote, that, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” – which is to say that no problem is too thorny if enough people take a crack at it.
• [On newspapers tapping into the community’s knowledge sharing through comments.] The [news]paper becomes merely the room in which the conversation takes place. Or to use Maness’s word for it, newspapers have entered the age of the ‘polylogue.’
• [On The Billion, referring to the one billion people who have access to the internet.] “They may have between two and six billion spare hours among them, every day.” (Yochai Benkler.) The onus, then, isn’t on the crowd; it’s on companies, entrepreneurs, and anyone else with a good idea to figure out how to put that to work.